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Bring Out The Gimps

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 25, 2025

Shamelessness was their superpower

For a man with a decades-long obsession with the world laughing at us (him) and a visceral fear of looking weak, Donald Trump sure is determined to give the world plenty to laugh about. Especially for our sworn enemies.

Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote Friday night in the U.S. Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth, the scandal-spangled, alleged hard-drinking, former Fox News weekend talk show co-host, as Trump’s next secretary of defense. What won’t Hegseth do at Trump’s whim? Shooting Americans in the legs could be the least of it.

Stuart Stevens, former chief Republican strategist and Lincoln Project adviser, posted to social media Friday night that “Trump could have appointed serious Conservatives to his Cabinet. Instead, he picked nuts and freaks. Why? To prove he could make Republican Senators do whatever he told them to.”

“Humiliation through submission,” Stevens concluded.

Republican senators are not the only ones Donald Trump means to humiliate through submission. He just wants to “do them” first to show the world who’s boss and who’s the gimp.

Screenshot from Pulp Fiction (1994).

Shamelessness was once the conservative superpower. Now it’s spinelessness. Trump is the Shameless One.

Every Democrat voted against Hegseth. In the end, only three Republicans voted against Trump’s nominee for defense secretary. No one else had the guts to be the final vote to defeat Trump’s pick (CNN):

Vice President JD Vance cast the 51-50 tie-breaking vote after former GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats to oppose Hegseth’s nomination. It was just the second time in history that a vice president has broken a tie for a Cabinet nominee – the other being then-Vice President Mike Pence for Betsy DeVos’ 2017 confirmation to lead the Education Department.

Politico describes McConnell as some kind of principled maverick for taking a stand against Hegseth.

McConnell’s chance to take a stand was during the Senate impeachment vote after Trump was charged with incitement of insurrection. McConnell’s shrinking from his responsibility in February 2021 led directly to Trump’s reelection and the complete debasement of Lincoln’s former Republican Party:

McConnell, in a lengthy statement, warned that whoever leads the Pentagon faces a “daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests.”

“Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been,” he said.

McConnell has failed repeatedly. The world is living with the consequences of his spinelessness before Trump, even if the childhood polio survivor votes against Trump HHS secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Russophile Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence nomination, or Kash Patel for FBI director.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis was rumored to be a Republican swing vote in the Hegseth confirmation. Tillis in the end swung Trump.

Coward.

— Rep. Wiley Nickel (@wileynickel.com) 2025-01-25T13:51:02.603Z

I make a lot of movie references in these pages. The images, characters and narratives are cultural shorthand. Too often, moderate Democrats and progressives would rather satisfy their egos and show off how smart they are by laying out detailed philosophical arguments against political adversaries. This is a mistake. Invoking sounds, images and stories already in people’s heads is more straightforward, as well as quicker than trying to plant and water them until they sprout. That’s not to say that there are not ideas that need cultivating, like renewing a sense of common purpose and civic duty. Those will take time and movies that might never be made.

For now, it is plain that Trump is trying to turn his own supporters into his gimps. I don’t need to paint that picture. Quentin Tarantino has already done that.

A Widespread Massacre

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 25, 2025

Oversight, His ass!

Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush): It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules (throws switch & electrocutes the Frat Boys). You see, I kill my own men. And lucky me…I get the girl. (Mystery Men, 1999.)

Donald Trump, twice-impeached convicted felon and career huckster, spent the first week of his second term exacting revenge against current and former officials who as much as contradicted his frequent misstatements. He cancelled the federal security details for Dr. Anthony Fauci, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook (The Hill):

Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for almost 40 years, including at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser, and Pompeo was Trump’s secretary of State. Hook was a key Pompeo aide.

All four men have fallen out of favor with Trump, with Bolton in particular now a strident critic of the president.

Fauci has long been the target of threats from anti-vaccine extremists. Iran has targeted Bolton for his role 2020 drone killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.

Friday night, Trump fired 17 federal inspectors general, internal watchdogs for multiple government agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Energy, reports The Washington Post. Trump’s action is an apparent violation of a federal law requiring that the president give Congress 30 days’ notice of firing a Senate-confirmed inspector general:

Most of those dismissed were Trump appointees from his first term, which stunned the watchdog community. One prominent inspector general survived the purge — Michael Horowitz at the Justice Department, an appointee of President Barack Obama who has issued reports critical of both the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.

“It’s a widespread massacre,” said one of the fired inspectors general. “Whoever Trump puts in now will be viewed as loyalists, and that undermines the entire system.”

You see, Trump fires his own men. In his first term, Trump hired “the best people” and subsequently fired dozens of them, and did again Friday night (New York Times):

The firings threatened to upend the traditional independence of the internal watchdogs, and critics of Mr. Trump reacted with alarm.

“Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse and preventing misconduct,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

Trump is in the process of sweeping away the last remnants of the Old Republic, to borrow from a cultural touchstone.

Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977).

In firing his own men, Trump sends a clear signal that he will tolerate no insubordination. There will be no oversight, no rules unbroken, no limits in his second term. Trump always wanted to be emperor and, as far as he’s concerned, he is one now. He has all but subjugated his entire political party and reduced its “leaders” to fawning courtiers. (But that’s another post.)

Meantime, Democrats in the minority struggle to find any way to restrain Trump’s worst instincts, unwilling or unable as many senior Democrats in Congress are, to face the fact that they are bringing 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gun fight. The Washington they knew was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 24, 2025

I find that I need animal soothers much more often than I used to. These are tough times. One of the sites that I look at every morning before I look at anything else is We Rate Dogs. I read it on Bluesky but you can find it on the other sites as well. The videos are fun and inspiring and heart warming. I think we all need a little bit more of that. Every day. Maybe twice a day…

There are hundreds more and each one makes me feel just a little bit better.

They also sell very cute merch which goes to helping dogs in medical need. Check them out if you need a quick soother.


Anthony Comstock Enters The Conversation

Published by digby on January 24, 2025

Yesterday, Trump pardoned a whole bunch of people who had been prosecuted for violating the FACE act by obstructing people’s access to abortion clinics. Some of them assaulted workers and patients in the process. So it’s not surprising that the anti-abortion zealots are feeling their oats.

Check this out:

Dear Acting Attorney General McHenry:

We are writing to urge the Department of Justice (DOJ) to enforce the anti-abortion trafficking rules in the so-called “Comstock Act” by (1) rescinding the Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) Memorandum Opinion, Application of the Comstock Act to the Mailing of Prescription Drugs That Can Be Used for Abortions (2022) and (2) taking immediate action to enforce the mail-order abortion prohibition within the Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1461‒62. These laws prohibit the distribution of abortifacient matter—including the abortion pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol—through the United States Postal Service, express companies, common carriers, and interactive computer services. The United States Supreme Court has recognized provisions of the Act as proper exercises of Congress’ Postal and Commerce Clause powers. Yet in recent years, there has been an alarming increase in the distribution of abortion pills by mail and online, which raises the risk of intimate partner violence and precludes essential health and safety screening for women seeking these drugs. It is imperative that the DOJ ensure compliance with the Act as a matter of public policy and patient safety

There’s more. It’s all horrible.

Liz Winstead’s Abortion Access Front has been sounding the alarm on this for a long time. It’s real. Project 2025 was all over it.

Hey Dems! You can derail Tulsi’s nomination! @spocko.bsky.social

Published by Spocko on January 24, 2025

I got into a conversation with some friend’s about the Dem’s failure to prepare for the nomination hearings. I KNEW that there were multiple weaknesses in them, but I also knew that the Trump team had a strategy to push them through.

 I saw lots of complaints about Dem Senators questions at the hearings. It is hard, especially when Team Trump uses these tactics:

1) Withholding evidence 

2) No background checks by FBI AND the FBI doesn’t share the info with all committee members

3) Coach candidates to give non-answers and to give technically correct, but misleading answers

“It wasn’t an NDA, It was a “non- disparagement clause in the divorce proceedings”
Come on man! GIVE ME A BREAK!

4) Threaten people who have legit questions about their qualifications, or have issues about their character. See what they did to Sen. Joni Ernst.

I started looking into Tulsi Gabbard. Howie Klein wrote about her at Down With Tyranny. Will Senate Republicans Draw The Line At Tulsi Gabbard? Very Very Unlikely Subhead: Does Trump’s Crazy Hare Krishna Belong To Putin?

I learned a lot. There are multiple weakness that could be exploited if someone was in charge of a PR campaign to derail her nomination. I don’t know if anyone is, but I do know the people in charge of pushing nominees are ON THE JOB! They are busy, pre-emptively shutting down lines of attack on Tulsi.

In Howie’s piece he points to an Atlantic article, “Elaine Godfrey managed to do what few reporters have managed to do— a journey to the heart of Gabbardism. She started at just the right place too: the Chris Butler Hare Krishna cult Tulsi built her life around.”

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Tulsi Gabbard
Other than raw ambition, only one through line is perceptible in a switchbacking political career
The Atlantic, January 21, 2025

Howie talks about meeting her:

When I first came across Tulsi Gabbard, she was two things to me: a right-wing Hare Krishna and a fanatic intent on persecuting the LGBTQ community in Hawaii. From the very beginning I saw her as, first and foremost, an enemy— and then as a brainwashed cultist moron.

Long before her sudden transformation into a Berniecrat— so still a right-wing, faux-Dem— she called me to ask for a Blue America endorsement. She didn’t really try to paint herself as a progressive and she came across as a garden variety careerist Democrat, not especially bad and not especially good. At the end of the interview, I asked her about the process by which she had come to change her position on LGBT equality. She immediately said she’d call back and then hung up abruptly and… never called back.

Howie Klein

Now, it might be interesting if some Dem senators asked her ask questions about her involvement with her Guru Butler. But if they did, she is prepared to take umbrage at it. Hegseth pre-emptively dismissed any concerns about his Christian Nationalism and nobody dug into it because it would require educating the public about its dangers.

The group in question, The Science of Identity Foundation, got ahead of any questions and put out a press release attacking the Media for how they are covered. They also got multiple groups to sign a letter to basically say, “Any attack on Butler & his group is an attack on all Hindus.” 

So, if any media WANTS to talk about the group & her connection to them will need experts or groups not on that list who can say, “Look, don’t lump all Hindus together. This is what Butler has said on homosexuality, gay marriage, transgender, and abortions. This is what these 3 main Hindu groups have said on these topics,  But Tulsi is her own person, ask her what her views are right now about these topics. What will come out is that she has “evolved” then “devolved” and “revolved.”
They could even go back to 1998, when here father Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

(YouTube link, I’ll but a copy of the video below in case it gets removed.)

Now, in my attempt to find those experts, I got this excellent comment, her Hinduism isn’t the issue here; it’s her hate campaign against gay and trans people.

That should be the focus, but it won’t come up during her hearings because it won’t be deemed relevant. But it is, because her position of power would give her the ability to persecute and gather information on groups here in the U.S. who she hates, for whatever reason. 

Jim Stewardson and my friends at Mind War suggested that I look up what Tulsi Gabbard had to say on Rumble (funded by Peter Thiel & now a publicly traded company) where she got big bucks for a few videos. I’m sure the Dems can ask her about how much she got when they get her TAX returns (if the FBI will provide it to them.) And seeing that Thiel companies (Palantir Technologies) is one of the big vendors to the intelligence community & Rumble is big in the misinformation & disinformation community, it wouldn’t be like a conflict of interest or anything… especially in the Trump admin.

Marcy Wheeler @emptywheel.bsky.social made a great point about the strategy behind Sen Kaine’s questions to Hegseth on the Nicole Sandler show last week.

Rather than saying, “Did you rape that woman?” he said “Did you cheat on your wife?” The more important question is, “Why didn’t you tell Donald Trump?”

This is, in my opinion, how Democrats should be approaching these hearings,
How can I describe the danger you pose to Donald Trump? How can I describe the danger you pose to the Republican project of, for example, really taking on China?

Marcy Wheeler on the Nicole Sandler show 1-17-2025

My point is It SHOULD be the job of the Dems who are going to talk to the media before, during and after these confirmation hearings to find weaknesses in these nominees that can be used to protect the American people.

I’m doing the best I can to help in advance. I’ve found a lot of damming videos of her on Rumble but the ones that won’t show up in the Senate hearings will be her anti-trans views because that’s been normalized on the right.

What MIGHT show up are ways that her flip flopping views might come back to hurt Trump, Trump cabinet members, rich gay donors, or Republican money making projects.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

Will Democrats Be The Reason RFK Jr Is Confirmed?

Published by digby on January 24, 2025

It looks like at least one of them (a person you would not expect) is considering it. Josh Marshall reports:

It probably won’t surprise you that RFK Jr., along with Tulsi Gabbard, are among the few Trump nominees who might actually not get confirmed. But I’m told that one senator who Democratic senators and health care advocates have real concerns about is none other than Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). To be clear, Whitehouse isn’t confirmed as voting for Kennedy. But he appears to be actively considering it. (Ed Note: WTF?)

Why? I’m told that there appear to be two reasons: One is that Whitehouse and Kennedy are personal friends. They were law school roommates at UVA and that seems to have been the beginning of a lifelong friendship. There are also specific issues with Rhode Island’s health care system that apparently need regulatory flexibility from HHS. That seems to be a real issue. But it hasn’t been enough of an issue to shift the state’s senior senator, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), who remains firmly opposed to Kennedy’s nomination.

Whitehouse isn’t the only Democratic senator not firmly locked down. There are also concerns about John Fetterman (D-PA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). But observers seem fairly confident that both will oppose Kennedy.

Whitehouse is the question mark.

Jesus H. Christ. I understand personal loyalty (although if one of my close friends decided to sell their soul to the antichrist as RFK has done, our friendship would not survive) but this is too much. Actually, I’m pretty sure that if my college roommate went batshit crazy years ago and was responsible for the deaths of dozens of Samoan children that friendship would have ended long ago.

The problem here is much bigger than one vote though. RFK’s nomination is in trouble. But if any Democrats come over, the GOP will hang together to let him through:

Here’s why Whitehouse’s possible vote to confirm Kennedy would be of more than just symbolic importance. There’s potential Republican opposition to Kennedy both for his advocacy in favor of polio, measles and other childhood diseases but also because, at least until a few weeks ago, he was pro-choice. But the first is the real problem. Dyed-in-the-wool anti-abortion advocates like Josh Hawley (R-MO) have giving Kennedy their blessing. It’s polio and measles, stupid, to paraphrase a younger James Carville.

Vote counters opposing Kennedy’s nomination believe there is a handful of Republicans seriously considering opposing Kennedy. But they’re unlikely to do so if one or more Democrats themselves vote to confirm him.

This is a question of life and death. If Whitehouse is your Senator (or Fetterman and Sanders, for that matter) I would suggest you give their offices a call. This is nothing to play with.

The Power Of Propaganda

Published by digby on January 24, 2025

If Dear Leader says it, it is true

People believe what they want to believe, I guess. And they want to believe that Donald Trump is a colossus who will save them from boredom and a sense of inferiority. Maybe he will. Apparently, all he has to do is say it a few times and they’ll believe it’s true.

Revolutionary Circumstances

Published by digby on January 24, 2025

California is no longer part of the United States. We are a colony from which Donald Trump’s America extracts money and resources. Our job is to worship Trump or suffer.

REPORTER: You talk about condition being placed on aid to California, voter ID and the like. Are there any conditions you’re gonna put on aid to North Carolina?

TRUMP: We’re gonna do a lot for North Carolina

R: So no conditions?

T: Well, in CA I have a condition. We want them to have voter ID

He is also demanding the Newsom opens “the valve.”

In case you were wondering…

“I want to see two things in Los Angeles. Voter ID, so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state. After that, I will be the greatest president that California has ever seen.”

Come on honey. Let me do it to you just this once. Then I promise I’ll buy you something really nice.

Update —

FINALLY! The NY Times has an excellent explainer on the California water situation. Gift link here. Maybe the cable newsers and others will be able to explain it to Americans.

What About Those Egg Prices?

Published by digby on January 24, 2025

Trump says he won the election because he used the word “groceries” Does he have anything to say about them now?

Trump on his first trip to a grocery store thrilled with the big bags of popcorn

During the presidential campaign last year, President Trump made a series of speeches and appearances at economic clubs around the country. He didn’t give the kind of formal speeches other candidates give to crowds like that which you would expect to be knowledgeable about finance and expecting serious plans a policies to meet the challenges of the current economy. He mostly just gave his usual stream of consciousness “weave” about whatever topic engaged him that day interspersed with some dull rote words on the teleprompter written by a campaign staffer. But during the Q&As he was often stymied by questions for which he was totally unprepared.

Perhaps the most famous instance was at the New York Economic club when a member asked him what he planned to do about the crisis in child care and he gave a meandering answer worthy of a 4th grader giving a book report of a book he hadn’t read. He said “childcare is childcare” and then basically said that his tariffs would somehow fix the problem.

As the campaign wore on and the campaign tightened up after President Biden dropped out, he had to make some “populist” gestures for the rubes. His campaign staff was reportedly frantic for him to talk about inflation so they assembled an event at his exclusive golf resort at Bedminster, New Jersey where he was surrounded by various food props. Unfortunately, he got caught up in his “weaves” and barely addressed the topic. They kept trying. A few weeks later he turned up at a grocery store and walked around it like it was the first time he’d ever been in one, as it may well have been.

He believes that he won the election on the basis of using the word “groceries” which he apparently believes is a unique term that only he had the savvy to deploy in a campaign.

Trump was never able to really say how he intended to bring down costs. Tariffs were his number one go-to answer to every economic question followed by “drill, baby, drill” as the solution to inflation and “growth” as the answer to deficits. That was basically his entire economic plan and in the midst of what was an overwhelming backlash against the post-pandemic inflation of 2022-2023 it seemed to be all that most voters needed to hear, at least the plurality that put him in the White House.

There was a group of enthusiastic backers who knew better, of course. The cyber-barons, CEOs and Wall Street Big Money Boys understood that the only thing he was bringing to the table was the prospect of deregulation and tax cuts, the holy grail of the billionaire class. Like most Americans, supporters and opponents alike, they don’t believe most of what he says anyway, which is one of the great sources of his power. They all figure his tariff threats are empty and even if they aren’t they can probably buy their way out of them. Just sending the message that any legal enforcement that might hurt the bottom line will no longer be pursued is enough to get them rushing to pay tribute to a president who is desperate to be a member of their exclusive club.

Former Trump advisor and podcaster/activist Steve Bannon has been outspoken against the tech-bro oligarchy led by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who now sits at the elbow of Donald Trump, going so far as to call him “evil” and vowing to purge him from the MAGA movement. But Bannon wasn’t invited to the inauguration, Musk was, along with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook among other billionaires and they sat in pride of place right in the front row while Senators and Cabinet members were seated behind them. Everyone knows who’s got the president’s ear in this term. Let’s just say that none of them are worried about the price of groceries.

In his interview with TIME magazine, Trump admitted that lowering costs is “hard” essentially telling everyone not to get their hopes up. And since he’s taken office, he’s issued a flurry of Executive Orders and policy changes, from freezing cancer research, rescinding civil rights protections, muzzling public health communications, even pushing to build many new coal plants to power his new AI initiative. That’s not even the half of it. But none of it will lower costs. In fact, he’s going out of his way to do the opposite.

As NBC news reported, one of his Executive Orders from the first day rescinded the Biden policy to study how to further “lower prescription drug costs for people on Medicare and Medicaid, on enhancing the Affordable Care Act and increasing protections for Medicaid enrollees.” Whether he will seek to roll back “the  $35 monthly cap on insulin, the $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cap on prescription drugs and Medicare’s negotiating drug pricing” isn’t yet known, but let’s just say it isn’t a good sign that he called the programs “radical” and “deeply unpopular” both of which are lies.

On Thursday Trump spoke before the World Economic Forum and reiterated his tariff threats which everyone with an 8th grade education should know will cause prices to rise. He demanded that the Fed lower interest rates and said later in the day that he “knows interest rates much better than they do.” He once again claimed that “we have a deficit” with Canada and encouraged them to become the 51st state so we won’t have to hit them with tariffs.

All of this is nonsensical gibberish, but if he does follow through, as he seems intent upon doing, the result will almost certainly be much higher gas prices:

The irony is thick. He claims that the inflation of three years ago was caused by high energy costs. And here he is promising to raise the price of gas. If he fulfills his threats to raise tariffs on Mexico, look to see your grocery bills skyrocket as well.

He says he wants to abolish FEMA and make the states take it over. (Of course the reason FEMA exists is because states simply don’t have the means and the infrastructure to do that.) And anyway, we know that Trump was only talking about denying aid to blue states like California which Republicans believe doesn’t deserve to be helped by the rest of the country. (They’re just supposed to send in lots of money to support the red states as they’ve been doing for decades.)

You will certainly remember that the price of eggs was the symbol of Democratic failure and seen by many as the avatar of pain at the grocery store. Well guess what?

Right now the US poultry industry is under tremendous threat from H1N1 bird flu and it’s making people sick and causing the price of eggs to skyrocket. That isn’t Trump’s fault but then the price spike in 2023 wasn’t Biden’s fault either. However, Trump freezing the National Institution of Health programs and the muzzling of the public health agencies is also going to lead not just to potentially deadly health outcomes but higher costs as well. Not to mention it’s going to be very difficult for the public to know about the threat. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into another pandemic.

But don’t despair. Trump did sign an Executive Order requiring all of his agencies to figure out ways to lower costs of everything. They’ll be reporting back to him with their plans in a month so I’m sure it’s all going to be taken care of.

Since the election Trump’s spent most of his time hobnobbing with billionaires and obviously not giving the price of “groceries” a second thought. Perhaps Americans have moved on and don’t care about the price of eggs anymore and are just thrilled that we’re going to invade Greenland and turn Canada into the 51st state. But if not, Trump may see his approval rating take a precipitous slide as he hobnobs with his personal coterie of cyber-barons and makes money for himself hand over fist while the rest of America watches their paychecks shrink for no good reason.

Salon

Why Trump Really Wants Greenland

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 24, 2025

The APs provides a hint

A post a couple of weeks ago suggested Donald Trump’s fascination with Greenland stemmed from his not understanding how maps work. Specifically, the Mercator projection that distorts Greenland to make it look larger than it is. I mocked up the image above while imagining Trump wanting to slap his name on the island in letters large enough to be seen from space.

A post from The Bulwark this morning has me thinking he might want more than a massive logo.

Trump this week signed executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and changing Alaska’s Denali back to Mt. McKinley. Noting that other countries are not obliged to follow Trump’s dicta and its own global audience, The Associated Press has updated its widely used style guide (I have one here) to version Trump 2.0:

The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.

As for Denali:

Trump also signed an executive order to revert the name of North America’s tallest peak, Denali in Alaska, to Mount McKinley. Former President Barack Obama changed the official name to Denali in 2015 to reflect the traditions of Alaska Natives as well as the preference of many Alaska residents. Trump said in his executive order that he wanted to “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley.”

The Associated Press will use the official name change to Mount McKinley. The area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.

Trump will undo everything Biden and Obama ever did, if he can. He’s just starting with checklist items he can manage with the stroke of a sharpie.

The Bulwark asks, “If Trump signed an order changing the name of Mt. Rushmore to Mt. Trump, would the AP follow along? It’s important in the Gulf of Mexico example that ‘all audiences’ be able to identify places with their names, but that doesn’t count if the places are ‘within the country’?”

Why would the size-obsessed Fauntleroy stop at Rushmore? Greenland is bigger … much bigger. If Trump somehow managed to “acquire” Greenland, why stop at just slapping a Trump brand on it large enough to be visible from the moon but not from the ground?

Isle of Trump? Trump Island? Trumpland?